Ben Chipman, a Green party member on Portland's Charter Commission, reports that the commission has preliminarily moved toward recommending instant-runoff voting as the method for selecting the city's mayor.

While there are legitimate concerns about IRV (as Al Diamon notes - though he misses another major criticism, which is the lack of proportional representation achieved through IRV), it does have the advantage of allowing people to vote for third-party candidates who may well lose, without feeling like they've wasted their vote when it could also have supported a like-minded major-party candidate.

Boston PhoenixInstant-runoff voting on its wayPublished 2/9/2010 by Jeff Inglis
Ben Chipman, a Green party member on Portland's Charter Commission, reports that the commission has preliminarily moved toward recommending instant-runoff voting as the method for...